10. Richard PryorThat Nigger’s Crazy
This is one of those records that is part of who I am. I knew all the bits by heart. I grew up in an all-white neighbourhood. I’d never heard anybody talk like that before, talk about the things he was talking about. Talk with such pride and confidence. I loved the way he talked. I loved the things he said. I loved the way he goofed on white people. He was teaching me things that I wasn’t gonna learn from white people. I listened to a lot of black music. I was learning a little bit about the struggle that they had. In all great comedy there’s pain and sadness and anger. And he really gave me a glimpse into a world that I had previously had no access to.
There were a bunch of us in my neighbourhood, we’d go around talking like Richard Pryor and doing Richard Pryor bits. Basically scaring a lot of the adults that were around us. There were a couple of older dudes on my street who we looked up to. They turned us on to Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and that’s where we heard Zeppelin for the first time. Like really heard it, heard the albums. That’s how we saw pot smoking. It was cool. They were inclusive. In retrospect, I had a really cool childhood. With some cool people who let me in on things, you know, showed me Creem magazine, just showed me another way. Other things that were going on that weren’t just spoon fed to everyone else. Outside the norm. And Richard Pryor was one of those things. Cheech & Chong was another.
I loved comedy. I remember when Saturday Night Live’ first started. By the second season I had a cassette recorder and I was recording it on my tape recorder and taking the tape recorder to school. We would play back bits at lunch. It was a language between friends. A shared experience, like doing John Belushi Samurai stuff or the ‘A Wild And Crazy Guy’ stuff or Bill Murray’s ‘Weekend Update’. It was an internal language amongst the ones of us who got it. That wasn’t everybody.
